


A Certain Shade of Blue

by scioscribe



Category: Sanditon - Jane Austen
Genre: Bathing machines, F/F, Sexual Tension, Swimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-01-30 03:50:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21421723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Yes, but every lady prefers her own bathing dress,” Mrs. Parker said.  Her certainties were few, but this was one of them, and she spoke with unaccustomed authority.  “Don’t you agree, Miss Heywood?”“If she has her own, I suppose she always prefers it to one that can be had by everybody,” Charlotte said, “and saves her envy for one owned only by someone else.”She herself had none.  The family economy had never allowed for the luxury of either a gown that would be seen by no one or one that existed only to be speedily removed.  She would either have to trust to Mr. Parker’s opinion of the healthfulness of the public dresses or allow the sea itself to ensure her modesty.
Relationships: Charlotte Heywood/Miss Lambe
Comments: 29
Kudos: 75
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Certain Shade of Blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stultiloquentia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/gifts).

The company at Trafalgar House was informed that the war would go on, though the morning’s battle had been lost; Miss Diana Parker had _not _persuaded Miss Lambe into a bathing machine, and she had been forced to withdraw her efforts after a mere two hours of vigorous encouragement, as she had the leeches to attend to. She was prepared to begin it all again to-morrow.

“I am determined she should not quit Sanditon without enjoying herself,” Miss Diana Parker said. “The sea cannot but improve her health—the air will succor the half of her which is English—and the only possible objection, that she would need to borrow a bathing dress, has been answered, as she already owns one.”

Mr. Parker hastened to assure the company that in _Sanditon_ any bathing dresses kept on hand for ladies’ general use were doubtlessly immaculate, unlike those of Brinshore. He would concede, yes, that he had it on good authority the life preservers at Brinshore had had their cork all rotted through, and furthermore it was true Brinshore’s dresses were steeped in cold and damp, very prone to the breeding of foulness and disease. But that was not Sanditon, had nothing to do with Sanditon; they could be very sure of that.

“Yes, but every lady prefers her own bathing dress,” Mrs. Parker said. Her certainties were few, but this was one of them, and she spoke with unaccustomed authority. “Don’t you agree, Miss Heywood?”

“If she has her own, I suppose she always prefers it to one that can be had by everybody,” Charlotte said, “and saves her envy for one owned only by someone else.”

She herself had none. The family economy had never allowed for the luxury of either a gown that would be seen by no one or one that existed only to be speedily removed. She would either have to trust to Mr. Parker’s opinion of the healthfulness of the public dresses or allow the sea itself to ensure her modesty.

Very naturally after that thought, her mind turned to not the bathing but the intimacy of the bathing machine, where modesty _would _indeed be briefly surrendered. She could not say she would like to be confined to one with Miss Diana Parker. Charlotte could easily imagine that officiousness spilling over into unwanted comment.

Perhaps that thought had likewise occurred to Miss Lambe; perhaps it accounted for her hesitation. If she did truly wish to bathe, she might accede more readily if asked by someone else—and Charlotte was closer to her in age and not, she thought, overbearing.

She resolved to call on Miss Lambe in advance of Miss Diana Parker’s second attempt upon her. Her determination was sorely tested by Miss Diana Parker’s habits of early rising and constant activity, but fortunately—for Charlotte, at least—a physician arrived on he following morning to inspect the state of Miss Parker’s gums. Miss Diana Parker chose to remain at her sister’s side to comfort her and advise the doctor on whether additional teeth had better not be removed after all, and Charlotte was thus free to rescue Miss Lambe—for that was how she had come to think of it. Charlotte was somewhat prone to fantasies of performing acts of notable heroism for beautiful young women.

Rendered on the unsentimental canvas of her real life, this heroism tended in practice to be good-humored, sedate, and subtle. Indeed, it was seldom much noticed by those who benefited from it.

* * *

The simple fact of Miss Lambe’s existence implied, to the English, narratives both sentimental and lurid. She suffered from having her complexion much discussed; its rare admixture seemed to bring out long-buried painterly instincts in her observers, who ceaselessly tried to intuit, by their artistic comparisons, exactly how Miss Lambe had come into the world.

Sanditon had judged her to be darker than one would expect even a half mulatto heiress to be—her father was thus convicted _in absentia_ as a radical, an eccentric, or both.

_Radical _was closest to the truth, though most radicals possessed more energy. He had been content to establish her fortune and, with it, his principles, and having done so, he saw no need to further involve himself; his storied household in Surrey continued on without her as it had for centuries.

Olympia Lambe believed that she did not mind being forgotten. She loved Mrs. Griffiths, and that lady had a true affection for her in return; it suited Olympia that that tie came with no obligation beyond continued payment of her fees. As a kind of perpetual schoolgirl, well cared-for but frozen in youth, she was not subjected to the attention of gentlemen—a thing she would have disliked.

Her present situation also had the advantage of included the Beaufort girls, who were pleasant and friendly so long as they were complimented. The Beauforts liked Olympia—though they would not have had the geometric knowledge to express the distinction, they viewed her as included in their _circle of acquaintance _but excluded from their _social sphere_. They enjoyed her company, wit, and generosity, but understood her circumstances to make her no real competitor with them in their quest for local renown; she was simply in a different category altogether. Therefore they were fonder of her than they would have been of any other heiress. It could not be said that they were the brightest creatures imaginable—certainly they lacked all curiosity—but they were ready suppliers of sweets Olympia’s physician had forbidden her, and likewise ready suppliers of gossip, which an invalid always enjoys despite her morals.

The Miss Beauforts, then, were responsible for Olympia recognizing Miss Heywood before Mrs. Griffiths had even finished introducing them.

“Tall,” Miss Leticia had said. “Monstrous tall and very bosomy, all the way out to here. Brown curls, arranged very well, and eyes like jade. She dresses plainly and sits in the corner looking a bit like a cat—you know how cats tend to look as if they should like to laugh at you.”

Mrs. Griffiths introduced the object of that description much more economically: “Miss Lambe, this is Miss Heywood, who is staying just now with the Parkers; Miss Heywood, this is Miss Lambe, whom I am honored to have in my care.”

With a few more pleasantries, she left them alone.

“I am sorry to not have met you before now,” Miss Heywood said. Her voice was both low and musical, each word a mellow note wrapped in velvet.

“It’s as well for us both that you did not,” Olympia said, “because I am afraid I would have made a very sorry picture—I was not much allowed out of bed, and even yesterday they kept constantly burying me in shawls.”

She hoped that would not seem too forbidding. Strangers often mistook her manner, believing her stilted when she meant to be honest, snappish when she meant to be friendly, and cold when she meant only to be properly reserved.

But Miss Heywood only looked sympathetic. “And in this heat!”

Olympia had now lived seven years in her father’s country; with each new calendar she waited for some sudden English understanding of the weather to descend upon her. “In this heat,” she agreed, willing to take Miss Heywood at her word that this was, as advertised, summer.

“If you’ve been having chills—”

“They’re quite gone,” Olympia said. They were not—they seldom left her entirely—but she did not want to lose her company.

Miss Heywood smiled. She had a generous mouth, and her smile lent a lovely plumpness to her cheeks. “Then I thought perhaps you might like to go down to the sea and bathe. I have not yet done so, and I would like to. If you still have not, and if the reason is only want of company—”

Olympia had often gone bathing as a child—then in waters far warmer than England could offer. Her father, on his occasional visits, had seen her mother combing sea-salt from her hair and called her quite the little mermaid. Her health had been strong in those days, and she had thought nothing of swimming for hours on end. Her mother had expected her to carry a parasol on walks, to keep what little fairness she had, but that the sun beat down on the sea just as strongly had somehow gone unnoticed. She had loved the sea like nothing else.

But then she had been young enough—and ignorant enough—to not worry where her eyes would go.

She truly did have a terror of the bathing machines. They required that she be both careless about her own undress and inattentive to that of the other ladies, and she did not know that she was capable of being either.

Certainly not, she thought, when she was with Miss Heywood. It would have been wiser to have gone yesterday.

She decided upon a firm demurral.

“That would be lovely,” she said. She waited in vain to hear some subsequent “but” emerge from her lips. “Is there any one time that would suit you more than another?”

“We could go now.” Miss Heywood hesitated and then added, with a strange fervency, “I’m afraid the Parkers are much occupied today, as a doctor has come. I am quite by myself, you see. At some other time we might easily—without even trying—assemble some large party, but a smaller venture felt right, if it is a first time for each of us.”

There would be a kind of terror, no doubt, to being alone with Miss Heywood in the small machine, but it would be worse, Olympia thought, for the vehicle to be quite packed with female flesh. And the only Parker she had met thus far had not primed her to be fond of the breed—or the advice they offered.

Olympia knew herself. She knew which of her afflictions she wished to be cured of and which she wished, against all common advice, to keep. She would not have welcomed instructions to purge her longing with leeches.

Miss Heywood, she sensed, was not the kind to interfere. She had come to ask Olympia to bathe, but she had not ordered her into the water.

“We can go now,” Olympia agreed. “Allow me to fetch my dress.”

She retreated to her room, where her maid at once, on her instruction, laid her necessary dresses out upon her bed. The outer garment, the seaside-walking dress, was a bold yellow silk that looked well against Olympia’s deep brown skin; its fastenings were cleverly equipped so she could have it off or on in a trice without Mary there to assist her. The bathing dress itself, the one that would be submerged, was as fine as gossamer, heavy only from the lead weights cunningly stitched into its hem. It would cover her entirely—if immodestly—and her skirts would not float up to expose her. She could not quarrel with such sensible garments.

But there would be a moment, in the bathing machine, when she would be wearing neither.

She was committed now, of course. She could not go out and tell Miss Heywood that she had changed her mind or suffered some sudden reversal of her health—or she could do so only if she could bear the knowledge that Miss Heywood would, with good reason, think her a coward.

She allowed Mary to help her into the walking dress, and she folded up the bathing gown—nearly as compact as a handkerchief—and placed it into her reticule.

She returned to the parlor. “I am ready,” she said to Miss Heywood, noticing once more, with great regret, that Miss Heywood was uncommonly handsome.

* * *

Charlotte had been in both life and Sanditon slightly longer than Miss Lambe, and this bestowed upon her, in both her eyes and Miss Lambe’s, some entirely imaginary expertise. Ordinarily her good sense would have kept her from falling into the traveler’s trap of uninformed pedantry; she had never before spoken at length on what she did not know, and hearing her do it now, her family would hardly have recognized her. Could the young woman prosing on about some Sanditon tale of merfolk—in truth a garbled tale half nursery story and half frantic invention of her own—really be their dear, unassuming Charlotte? Sadly, yes. Any author is chagrined to note her heroine’s lapse into the risible domain of her more comic characters—but it must be admitted that Charlotte had so lapsed now. The reader, observing her passage down to the shore, would have seen very little to differentiate her from her hosts.

But closer study would reveal that Charlotte’s sudden foolishness stemmed from a very sympathetic folly. She had been surprised to find Miss Lambe so captivating.

She had expected Miss Lambe to be beautiful, for everyone had called her so. Charlotte had the heart of a _chevalier_ and was vulnerable to the beauty of other girls, but she had never before been wounded by one. Her passions had been small and quiet, easily soothed by longing looks or kisses from friends who treated the exchange as a game. Some of those friends had perhaps even been as lovely as Miss Lambe. But none of them had looked at her with Miss Lambe’s strange intensity.

It was dizzying to believe that Miss Lambe could, without further study, have numbered each button on Charlotte’s own dress.

Consequently, Charlotte became silly and talked of mermaids.

The sensible portion of her mind, kept away from the welter of passion and flattery, was relieved to note that at least Miss Lambe did not appear to be bored by her. The reader may deduce from that that Miss Lambe was in that same hurdy-gurdy of ungainly feeling. Lovers are saved from themselves more often than they know, because providence allows that they may both come to stupidity together: one, to speak it, and the other, to applaud it.

Charlotte said, “I believe people used to come down to throw apples out onto the sea, in case feeding the mermaids would bring them good fortune.”

“Why apples?”

Pressed to account for the logic of her own story, Charlotte could not. “I suppose it was a matter of what they had on hand. Though—if that were the case, there’s no reason bread wouldn’t have done just as well. But perhaps they tried that, and the gulls took it up too quickly.”

Miss Lambe nodded. She had not taken her parasol with her, though it had lain by Mrs. Griffiths’s door; her face, in the pearly sunlight, was seen to its best advantage. Her eyelashes, Charlotte noticed, had a fine downward slant to them, creating an elegant dark fringe around her soft, honey-colored eyes.

“I would regret feeding seagulls when I intended to feed mermaids,” Miss Lambe agreed. “I cannot imagine what favors the gulls would do to earn their bread.”

“It is hard to say what the mermaids themselves would do in the proper way of things,” Charlotte said, coming slightly back to her senses, “but at least it is easier to attribute magic to them. I can think of nothing less magical than a seagull.”

On this pronouncement, they came to the bathing machines of Sanditon.

The machines had been, by dint of Mr. Parker’s great activity, painted white and gold. A brief corridor of oiled canvas jutted out on the sea-facing side of each machine, to allow the bathers to go down into the water without being seen. Charlotte was impressed by them and resolved to that very evening delight Mr. Parker by praising them at length.

“Look at the sea,” she said, more natural now. “Even calm, the waves make little points like diamonds. I’ve never been so close to it in my life.”

“I lived almost upon it, when I was younger,” Miss Lambe said. She sounded as if she were half in a dream. “But the water was bluer there—a pale blue-green, like the sky and the grass had been stirred together. I have not found that color anywhere else.”

Charlotte had not left her home before she had come just the little way to Sanditon. She could not imagine traveling so far that even a color could be lost. She had known there was a gulf between their lives, but she had not felt until then how great and strange it was. It did not amount to only race or fortune. Miss Lambe was alone, and Charlotte’s life had been crowded elbow-to-elbow; Miss Lambe had known many countries, and Charlotte had scarcely seen two towns; Miss Lambe had been forced into strangeness, and Charlotte had been invited. It seemed remarkable in that moment that they had come to the same place at all.

She looked over and saw Miss Lambe shading her eyes with one hand, staring out at the waters with their unfamiliar hue. The wind stirred the skirts of her buttercup-yellow dress.

“Perhaps we could go the library after we bathe,” Charlotte said, hardly knowing what she was saying. “When I was there with Mr. Parker, I saw that Mrs. Whitby had a number of ribbon samples, whole rainbows of them. We could look for your color, or you could show me what is closest to it. It will not be the same, of course—but I should like to do it with you.”

Miss Lambe’s eyes, now quite wide, met Charlotte’s, and, lips parted, she nodded as though she did not trust herself to speak. 

* * *

As she mounted the wooden steps to the bathing machine—their layers of paint not quite disguising how the sand and salt air had nibbled pockmarks into them—Olympia considered that she might, after all, have been better served by standing endlessly on the shore feeling tragical.

They had paid the pull-men, who had been at pains to assure them that there would be horses to do this work soon—everything as advanced as they could wish—and that the ladies would have the most complete modesty imaginable. They would only have to ring the bell inside—yes, the cord to their left, that would do it—and they would be off into the water and, at their next ring, back again onto the shore.

“It’s been quiet yet,” the purveyor of it all said, “and so we won’t make you ladies wait till more company comes along. This here holds four, spacious as you please, but we’ll go out for now with just you two.”

At least, then, she would not have to suffer the indignity of changing in tightly-packed company—for she did _not _think the bathing machine was as spacious as she pleased, whatever its operator believed. But there were risks, perhaps even more painful risks, to baring her body in Miss Heywood’s exclusive company. Yet now there was nothing to be done. It was entirely too late—as it had been from the start—to cry off.

Olympia passed into the cool shade of the machine.

It was a neat, orderly device, with well-polished clothes-pegs on the wall and cupboards stationed up near the roof; her walking gown would be kept quite dry. The curtains were, as promised, secure. All that remained was to change.

“I—”

Olympia turned her head. Miss Heywood’s face was touched pink with embarrassment.

“I will have to simply go in,” Miss Heywood said. “Without—” Her flush deepened. “I do not have a separate bathing dress. I could hire one, but if you do not think it necessary—I know it is not uncommon to bathe without…”

Was it not? She could not imagine the full expanse of Miss Heywood’s form, as silver-pale as moonlight in the dim. She would—if she looked—see things she had never seen except on her own body. There was so much about women that she had had to deduce from the humble sample of only herself, knowing that she was—and more than ever now, in England—an anomaly. She did not know to a certainty that there would be those crinkly hairs between Miss Heywood’s legs, fixed with that same lack of style and order. And beneath those curls, where Miss Heywood’s body parted, what color would she be? What color was any other girl? Olympia had seldom even seen the soft cup or creased underside of a lady’s knee. There were so many hidden seams to the body—it was not, like her seaside walking dress, made to be comprehended in a trice.

Her lips were dry as she said, “There is no need for you to borrow anything. Miss Parker, yesterday, told me that those public gowns can be horrid. I am sure there is nothing to fear from you going without.”

“It does somehow feel decadent enough to make me ashamed,” Miss Heywood said. Her fingers were already stealing down over the buttons of her dress.

“As if you were playing Venus,” Olympia said. Would it have been more appropriate to contradict her, to argue? She grew chilly, she’d long thought, when she most wanted to be warm—her words seemed to sprout both ice and angles, turning cutting and cold. Or at least people had always reacted to her as if that were so—as if her ardor, roused, was something frightening to them.

It was not so with Miss Heywood, who only developed yet another flush of rose, this one still deeper than the last. “I—I cannot quite manage the back of my dress. If you would not mind—”

Olympia could see the row of her buttons, now half-undone, and it was easy enough to see that it should have been little enough trouble for Miss Heywood to go on as she’d begun.

Her heartbeat seemed to rise up into her throat. “Yes,” she murmured, unsure of whether or not the words stirred from her lips were even apparent. “Yes, I can help you, of course.”

The buttons were small and covered in damask. Olympia’s fingers were shaking.

Little by little, she exposed the clear skin of Miss Heywood’s back, bare between her shoulder-blades before her the linen of her bodice began. Her skin was the pale biscuit color of the sand outside, suspended against the white of her shift. Delicately, and with more daring than she had felt before, Olympia allowed one fingertip to rest there, in the shallow groove of Miss Heywood’s spine.

“Do you really have no bathing dress?” she said quietly.

“Yes,” Miss Heywood said. “But if I had a whole trunkful, I would burn them all for this.” There was a strange quality to her voice, as if her frankness were warring with some bottled-up laughter. Olympia did not know that she liked it, but other parts of her seemed willing to supply certainty.

Miss Heywood surrendered both dress and undergarment to the pegs. She stood there, nude as Grecian sculpture, one hand shyly down between her legs, the other arm held across her bosom.

Olympia felt an aching all through her body, brittle and unbearable, like a twig waiting to snap.

She turned hastily away, humiliatingly conscious of the cramping heat between her legs, and undressed in a way that offered Miss Heywood only her back, and that only briefly. The advertisements extolling the virtues of her bathing dresses—and in particular the speed and convenience they offered—had spoken only the truth.

She did not turn around until she was clothed once more. It was only the flimsiest of garments, but she felt that without it she would have burst into flames; what was in her was too strange and uncontrollable.

Miss Heywood was no longer flushed but milky pale. Her arm across her breasts had tightened, as if she needed to hold herself in, and the pressure had made her bosom spill to either side of her covering of it. Olympia could see one long blue vein on the underside of the right.

“Did I go too far?” Miss Heywood, her lips barely moving. “Have I made a fool out of myself?”

“No. Never.” Olympia felt the silk of her dress beginning already to stick to her skin, where sweat had blossomed across her. “But I do not know what to do.”

It cost her something to admit it. She’d wanted to retreat into her dignity.

But the reward for her confession was seeing Miss Heywood’s smile again—positively luminous now.

“I believe for now—if your stay in Sanditon is bound to be long—”

“It is.”

“—we may simply bathe, and begin to know one another better.”

“I would find that most agreeable,” Olympia said, feeling that strange scorching frost once more.

She reached up and pulled the cord. The machine’s bell sang out a clear, silver note.

She remembered to say, “My Christian name is Olympia,” and had in return that Miss Heywood’s was Charlotte; she considered its sounds very pleasing to the tongue.

* * *

Charlotte’s spirits were so high that she felt, for the first time, love’s true danger—one did not fall into it without risking some subsequent fall _from _it, some dizzying plunge back to a low and ordinary world. But the day was too bright for much fear.

And, quite apart from that, her head ruled her as much as her heart, and she thought many a woman had had perverse inclinations without such a fine outcome for them.

For despite Miss Lambe being an heiress, she was, by the peculiarity of her circumstances, not one whose failure to marry would be thought of as meanly depriving a gentleman of his fortune. She could live independently without censure, and that was close to an impossible thing—as all this was. She half-expected to see apples bobbing red on the waves and to find that they were trespassing among mermaids.

But as they went down into the sea, she and Miss Lambe—Olympia—they were more or less alone. A party of gentleman whooped some ways off from them, invisible except as white heads—like peeled apples, perhaps?—and slick caps of hair.

Charlotte had descended first, and so she turned and paddled backwards, her toes occasionally brushing the silty sand; she watched as Olympia joined her.

Her dress was another bit of earthbound dreaming. It was made of cream-colored silk so fine that in places it was nearly translucent—thoroughly wetted, Charlotte thought, it would become so, and she would see Olympia’s body outlined in clinging cloth.

“It is _cold_,” Olympia said.

“It is as warm as any bath I’ve ever had, but I have too many brothers and sisters.”

“Far too many!” Olympia agreed, shivering as she came further down. Her last step, a kind of bounce off the final stair, plunged her into water up to her breasts.

Charlotte almost laughed at her, but she could not be sure that would, so early in the day, be encouraged; she ducked a little beneath the water to hide her smile and her trembling chin.

Olympia waded towards her, not yet daring—or, smothered in skirts, not yet able—to lift her feet and swim. She regarded Charlotte with a kind of wonder. _Then_, trusting completely that she would not laugh, Charlotte resurfaced.

“What is it?”

“I can see you still,” Olympia said softly, “through the water, when we are so close.”

She fought the urge to press her legs together and again hide her bosom. She did not know that she had a form that rewarded such close attention, but Olympia, certainly, offered no criticism of it. She even reached out, very daringly, and brushed her hand against the soft curve of Charlotte’s hip beneath the water. Sand floated up around Charlotte’s feet where her toes curled. She let her head fall back, unconscionably choosing to soak her hair beyond the day’s recovery.

“There.” Olympia clutched at her hand. “Your eyes, reflecting back the sky. That is my blue.”


End file.
